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Posts tagged 'Library of Congress'

Ann Cleare's eyam series consists of "five attacca pieces for clarinets and flutes, all of which deal with ideas of isolation and infiltration." Cleare's work explores the static and sculptural nature of sound, probing the space between composer, performer, and instrument with texture, noise, sound, and silence. The inspiration for the eyam series comes from the town of Eyam, in Derbyshire, England; it chose to cut itself off from the outisde world when the plague was discovered there in 1665. Positioning instrumentalist as "village", the eyam pieces tug at the differences between individual and multiple, safety and danger, the known and the unknown.

Inspired by the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, Into That World Inverted imagines the inside of instruments, "where left is always right,/where the shadows are really the body,/where we stay awake all night,/where the heavens are shallow as the sea[...]". Check out a recording of it below.

A work of almost prayer-like gentleness opened the program. Hannah Lash’s lovely, understated “Two Movements for Violin and Piano” (a commission by the Library’s McKim Fund, in its premiere) used the simplest of means — a cantabile violin line over a spare and open piano accompaniment — to create a sense of wistful reflection, then hesitation, before finding release in the soaring second movement.

In the next two months, two new works by PSNY composer Hannah Lash will be heard by audiences in New York and Washington, D.C. On October 23rd, Lash premieres her new Concerto for Harp and Chamber Orchestra with the American Composers Orchestra, as a part of their SONiC Festival, at Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall. George Manahan conducts, with Lash herself as soloist. For the concerto, Lash was concerned with taking on "all the ramifications of our perception of this instrument's character," creating a work that is "mysterious and beautiful and at the same time fearful, aggresive, lonely."

To get a sense of what some call her "avant-garde post-romantic" style, check out this in-depth interview produced by Harvard Magazine: